Waiting In The Heat As A Dad Is Judged

July 11, 1985|By Bill Stokes.

CLAYTON, MO. — I have sons, and maybe that is why I was drawn here, perhaps like a moth to flames. Or maybe as a social scavenger, conditioned to seek out and perch on the remains of decadent circumstance.

How could a father put a cannonlike revolver to the head of his 22-year-old son and then pull the trigger? How could he do such a horrendous thing in order to collect on his son`s life insurance? How could this father, a beloved doctor in the small southern Illinois town of Eldorado, then go through the motions of grief until the police came to arrest him?

Those are the questions that explode out of the first-degree murder trial for Dr. John Dale Cavaness here this week.

The questions sizzle in the small courtroom like leftover fireworks, and a jury grapples with them while a summer heat wave simmers this old town as if it were yesterday`s soup.

Prosecutor Steve Goldman said that Dr. Cavaness murdered his son Sean on the morning of Dec. 13, 1984, and left his body in a remote area near the community of Times Beach, Mo. Goldman said he expects the doctor to be convicted; if he is, Goldman will seek the death penalty.

Cavaness, 59, who looks a little like actor James Whitmore, sits quietly in the court room and listens to this kind of talk. He has been held in jail here since his arrest.

It will be his defense that Sean shot himself, and Cavaness then fired a second shot into Sean`s head to make it look like a murder because he did not want other family members to have to deal with the stigma of suicide.

Part of his reason for doing this, Cavaness claims, was because of the gunshot death of another son in 1977. Mark Cavaness, then 22, was killed by a single shotgun blast on a catfish farm owned by his father. The death was not considered a suicide but no charges were brought against anyone.

Cavaness was the beneficiary of a life insurance policy on Mark. Mark`s death is being reinvestigated.

Many of Cavaness` patients in Eldorado refuse to believe that he could be guilty of Sean`s murder. They have collected more than $36,000 to help pay defense attorney Arthur Margulis, and they have been outspoken in praise of the doctor, who delivered their babies and helped cure and comfort them for 30 years.

But prosecutor Goldman said that during the trial he will show that the two bullet holes in Sean`s head, either one of which would have killed him, are not consistent with suicide.

Cavaness claimed he had not seen Sean for four weeks prior to his death, Goldman said, and then changed his story only after witnesses saw the two of them greet each other and embrace under a street light on the night before Sean was killed.

Cavaness took his son out and got him drunk and then shot him in the head, Goldman said, so that he could collect more than $140,000 in life insurance claims. Sean`s blood alcohol content was 2.6 when he died, twice what is considered legal intoxication under Missouri law.

Margulis said Cavaness is innocent and ``lived a nightmare in the rain and fog on the morning of Dec. 13 and continues to live a nightmare for what he tried to do to cover up a suicide.``

In 1972, Cavaness was convicted of reckless homicide when his pick-up truck crashed into another vehicle, killing a young father and his 10-month-old daughter. He was fined and put on probation in 1980 for fraudulent Medicaid payments.

Cavaness has collected large insurance claims for a number of fires in buildings that he owned.

Cavaness was divorced from his first wife when he married Marian Newberry in 1952. She was the mother of his four sons: Mark and Sean, the two gunshot victims, and Kevin, 28, and Patrick, 18. The second marriage broke up during the 1970s.

Goldman said Cavaness` personal finances were in a chaotic state and he had been losing money on various agricultural enterprises.

Margulis said Cavaness may have had cash flow problems but his net worth is more than $1 million.

So all this week, while the sticky summer heat comes down over mid-America like warm honey, they will argue about all of these things.

The jury of three men and nine women will watch and listen to the parade of witnesses, and they will try to answer a most bizzare question with as much dignity as society is capable of producing. Did the small-town doctor fire one or two bullets into his son`s head?